Shantideva's Refutation of the Nyaya-Vaisheshika Concept of God PJ Johnston. Introduction:

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1 Shantideva's Refutation of the Nyaya-Vaisheshika Concept of God PJ Johnston Introduction: In verses of the wisdom chapter of his Bodhicharyavatara, Shantideva offers a refutation of the Nyaya-Vaisheshika concept of Ishvara (or God). Radhakrishnan's Source Book in Indian Philosophy identifies the Nyaiyikas as a school of logic/epistemology famous for a 5- part syllogism ( ) and the Vaisheshikas as a metaphysical school asserting atomistic realism ( ); because of a certain complementarity to their views, the two schools are sometimes considered a single stream of Indian philosophical thought. While the Vaisheshikas may originally have been non-theistic in inspiration, subsequent commentaries in their school found reference to the interworking of atoms and karmas insufficient to guarantee some elements of the received religious tradition, and borrowed the Nyaiyika concept of Ishvara to explain the teleological order of the universe, the authority of the Vedas, and the correspondence of words and their meaning (386). When Shantideva wrote his wisdom chapter, he treated the two schools as non-distinct, attributing to both schools the theological opinions of the Nyaiyikas. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso's commentary on the Bodhicharyavatara, Meaningful to Behold, relates that the Nyaya-Vaisheshika concept of Ishvara attributed to the deity the five qualities of divinity, purity and worthiness of veneration, permanence, partlessness, and being the creator of everything (338), and it is the deity-concept in which these qualities are central that Shantideva is at pains to refute. 1 Verse 118: If Ishvara is held to be the cause of beings,

2 You must now define for us his nature. If by this, you simply mean the elements, No need to tire ourselves disputing names! In verse 118, Shantideva challenges the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas to specify what they mean in referring to Ishvara. This is the logical place to begin the discussion - if for example the Nyaya- Vaisheshikas meant by "Ishvara" something that Shantideva would accept as conventionally existing (e.g. the elements), there would be little point in disputing over names ("Ishvara" rather than "the elements") because both sides would admit the existence of the entity in question, having an entirely verbal disagreement about what to call it. Shantideva does not give his opponents an opportunity to define for themselves what "Ishvara" means, but attributes to them the view that "Ishvara" is the same as "the elements". It is not clear that the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas would have affirmed this, since the Vaisheshikas are thought to have borrowed the Nyaya god-concept specifically to avoid some of the undesirable theological consequences of strict atomism - if "Ishvara" for them meant merely "the elements," why would the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas invoke him to rescue their already materialistic system? Perhaps this is done out of hermeneutical charity (that is, the identification of "Ishvara" with "the elements" is the god-concept Shantideva believes is the strongest and least vulnerable to philosophical refutation given the total range of possible conventional entities acknowledged in the Prasangika-Madhyamika conceptual universe, so he attributes the identification to the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas to strengthen their position); but the move could be plausibly suspected of being a strawperson because Shantideva clearly has a refutation in mind for Ishvara being identified with the elements (perhaps he intentionally defined "Ishvara" on terms he knew he could easily refute!), and/or suspected of relying upon the fallacy of false alternatives (it is possible that the range of entities imagined in the Nyaya-Vaisheshika Weltanschuung is 2

3 fundamentally different from the categories to which the Prasangika-Madhyamikas attempt to reduce phenomena, in which case further argumentation would be necessary to show that the metaphysical possibilities really are thus delimited; perhaps there is something else Ishvara could be that Shantideva is simply not prepared to recognize!) In any event, one could easily imagine the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas feeling, in their enforced silence, as if they were misunderstood and/or misrepresented, not perceiving their actual position as the proper target of Shantideva's refutation. Verse 119: Yet earth and other elements are many, Impermanent, inert, without divinity. Trampled underfoot, they are impure, And thus they cannot be a God Omnipotent. Here Shantideva shows that the idea of a deity having the five qualities of divinity, purity and worthiness of veneration, permanence, partlessness, and being the creator of everything (the view attributed to them by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso) is inconsistent with the idea of a deity being the same as the five elements (the view Shantideva attributes to the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas in the previous verse) because the five elements are in fact impermanent, inert, without divinity, trampled underfoot, and impure. If this is so, then the Nyaya-Vaisheshika view of Ishvara would be internally inconsistent for asserting that a deity identical to the five elements is one that has qualities opposite to those of the five elements, and Shantideva would have refuted the possibility of any entity thus conceived actually existing. This argument can only be successful if the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas hold all the views attributed to them; if the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas do not, then this argument might disprove some concept of Ishvara, but not theirs. Verse 120ab: 3

4 The Deity cannot be Space - inert and lifeless. It cannot be the Self, for this we have refuted. In 120ab, Shantideva considers the notion that "Ishvara" might be defined as identical to space, but rejects it because space's distinctive qualities (being inert and lifeless) contradict the five qualities the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas attribute to deity. If Ishvara is lifeless and inert, he will not be the creator of everything, nor anything like a personal theistic god. Having already refuted the possibility of Ishvara being identical to the five elements and the notion of an inherently-existing self, Shantideva believes that he has exhausted the entire catalog of conventionally-existing entities, and that the concept of Ishvara is incoherent as such. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso calls vv a "refutation of what is meant by the god Ishvara," which seems to mean that Shantideva is attempting a knock-down, drag-out refutation of Ishvara as a possible entity. (Shantideva's argument-by-elimination appears incomplete, however - why for instance could not have Ishvara been a conventionally-existing person if not an inherently-existing self, since Shantideva refuted the latter and accepts the existence of the former?) Verse 120cd: It's inconceivable, they say. Then likewise is its creatorship. Is there any point, therefore, to such a claim? In 120cd, Shantideva considers the possibility that the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas will counter that even though there is not a straightforward account of Ishvara's nature, there is an incomprehensible one that maintains the five qualities the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas attribute to Ishvara. Shantideva believes he has a definitive argument against an incomprehensible deity - if Ishvara is inconceivable, so will be his creatorship, and since an inconceivable deity and creatorship are self-evidently absurd, the claim must be pointless and counterproductive. It is possible this is anticipating a point from the epistemology of modern logical positivists - if a 4

5 claim is not clearly conceivable and therefore falsifiable, it is meaningless and should be dropped from discourse ("what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence"). Shantideva's argument makes the most sense if one assumes there is a point of Prasangika-Madhyamika or perhaps Nyaya-Vaisheshika epistemology behind it - if one or both schools believe that to exist, even conventionally, something must be capable of being distinctly conceived, the argument has some purchase. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso glosses this passage as meaning "if your Ishvara is unknowable, this seems to us a perfect indication of his nonexistence," which seems to indicate such an epistemology. (And it would make perfect sense for Prasangika-Madhyamikas to have such an epistemology, as according to them conventional reality depends upon valid, mistaken perceptions that are clearly enough cognizable to allow conceptualization/communication - if a concept is properly incomprehensible, wouldn't that be the same thing as to suggest its object is conventionally non-existent?) If one does not share such assumptions, however, the argument against an incomprehensible deity may appear a bit strange. I will return to the topic later, but for the time being suffice it to say that on some theological accounts, the notion that the deity is incomprehensible is an intentional feature of the argument and not a position one avoids taking until one is forced to do so because such a concept is considered self-evidently absurd. I believe that there is more to be said for an incomprehensible deity than Shantideva is prepared to consider - perhaps in Indian philosophy the "divine incomprehensibility" family of theistic arguments was developed after Shantideva's time or he was somehow unaware of them, accounting for his refusal to entertain them in robust form. Verses ab: What is it that the Deity wishes to create? 5

6 Has it made the self and all the elements? But are not self and elements and it, itself, eternal? And consciousness, we know, arises from its object. Pain and pleasure have, from all time, sprung from karma, So tell us, what has this Divinity produced? I am not certain what Shantideva is arguing in these verses. At the most general level, he seems to have switched from his refutation of what is meant by the god Ishvara (an argument that the concept itself is incoherent) to a refutation of the specific claim that Ishvara is the creator because there is nothing intelligible to speak of him having created. Speaking very loosely, if the first argument is a sort of reverse ontological argument (if the deity is conceived in this manner, it cannot but fail to exist), this argument appears to be a reverse cosmological argument (since there is nothing Ishvara might have created, he cannot be a creator). But the steps of the argument are a little obscure to me, as they are translated and glossed very differently in our texts and I do not have access to the underlying Sanskrit/Tibetan. In the Dalai Lama's text, Ishvara cannot have made the self and all elements because he, the self, and the elements are eternal and cannot have been made by anybody (121abc), with consciousness (another possibility for something Ishvara could have made) arising from the object rather than from Ishvara (121d). Duerlinger's text seems to support this interpretation. Batchelor's translation introduces the notion that Ishvara is the cause of the later continuity of himself, a concept not present in Duerlinger or the Dalai Lama's translations. He agrees with with Duerlinger and the Dalai Lama that Ishvara cannot have made the self, the elements, and so forth because they are held by the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas to be permanent and uncreated, and likewise upholds the argument that Ishvara cannot be the creator of consciousness because consciousness arises from its object. In Geshe Kelsang Gyatso's reading, Ishvara is asserted by 6

7 the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas to be the creator of the "subsequent continuum of himself" (as per Batchelor) and consciousness is said to arise from its object (as per Duerlinger, the Dalai Lama, and Batchelor), but unlike all the other translations, Ishvara cannot have caused these things to come into existence because he is permanent and cannot enter into causal relations (339). Perhaps the notion of Ishvara being the cause of the continuum of himself is borrowed from a digest of the opinions of the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas that Batchelor/Gyatso or their preceptors have read and Duerlinger/the Dalai Lama and their preceptors have not, or Batchelor and Gyatso rely on a different edition of the Shantideva text from Duerlinger and Thupten Jinpa, the translator for the Dalai Lama; at any rate, this difference is not especially significant to the logic of Shantideva's argument. The more significant disagreement is the one that explains why Ishvara cannot have created the things the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas claim he made - is it because Ishvara is permanent and cannot enter into causal relations, or because these things are eternal (or at least beginningless) and cannot have been created by anybody? At any rate, the overall thrust of the argument is to refute the claim that Ishvara is the creator of anything by refuting the Nyaya- Vaisheshika claim for each and every specific entity Ishvara might have created. In 121d-122ab, Shantideva argues that consciousness arises from its object and pain and pleasure come from karma, so they cannot have been created by Ishvara. If this is so, Shantideva believes there is nothing else left that Ishvara could have created, thus refuting the idea that he could be the creator. One gets a little uneasy with the arguments in , because the argument-by-elimination relies on categories native to Prasangika-Madhyamika cosmology and the explanations provided in that system for how they could arise; one suspects that if they were allowed to speak, the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas might use radically different categories and offer them 7

8 a plausible explanation not elsewhere refuted in the wisdom chapter. Verse 122cd: And if creation's cause is uncreated, How can origin be part of the result? Here Shantideva argues that if Ishvara (the cause of everything) is uncreated, then the effect (the universe) is also uncreated, because if you have a beginningless cause you must also have a beginningless effect. Cause and effect are relational terms which must arise in dependence upon the relationship from which they are borrowed, making it impossible to go back to an absolute first cause that is itself unconditioned by relationship. Verses : Why are creatures not created constantly, For Ishvara relies on nothing but itself? And if there's nothing that it has not made, What remains on which it might depend? If Ishvara depends on something else, the cause of all Is the prior circumstances, and no longer it. When these obtain, it cannot but create; When these are absent, it is powerless to make. If Ishvara has no intention, But yet creates, another thing has forced it to create. If it wishes to create, it's swayed by its desire. Even though creator, then, what becomes of its omnipotence? While disagreeing in some particulars, the overall thrust of the commentators is to suggest that Ishvara's permanence and/or autonomy refute the claim that he is a creator. The Dalai Lama holds that Ishvara's permanence makes it impossible for him to be a creator - a permanent cause cannot produce anything (122cd), but the alternative is that Ishvara is dependent to create upon conditions, and if this is so Ishvara cannot be the "single, solitary cause" of everything because the conditions are. Even if he creates the conditions that constrain him, this introduces heteronomy into the concept of Ishvara, who is said to lose his independence 8

9 vis-a-vis creation if he must rely on outside conditions to create. Even if the condition in dependence upon which Ishvara creates is nothing but Ishvara's own desire, desire is construed as an impermanent, afflictive emotion that somehow gains power over Ishvara, constraining his power to make free choices. "Even if Ishvara acts with the desire to act, then he would be conditioned by desire" (149). And if things are created contrary to Ishvara's desire, then he is clearly not their creator/omnipotent lord. Obviously, the commentators believe that the Nyaya-Vaisheshika claim that Ishvara is the creator of all things is to be understood in the most radical possible sense - any mediation (even self-imposed) between Ishvara's creative activity and its effects is understood to make Ishvara heteronomous and not the single creator of all things. I am not certain that this is a natural assumption to make - would the commentators deconstruct a sculptor's claim to have produced a sculpture because he used a chisel, or insist that the Buddha must have been swayed by afflictive desires (and hence be heteronomous rather than autonomous) when he acts on his inclination to save sentient beings? Perhaps there is an implicit notion that a creator of everything and eternal agent must create and act in a very different way than the creator of some particular thing or the doer of some particular action, but I neither see the necessity for this assumption nor evidence for Shantideva having assumed it elsewhere in the text; perhaps there is a digest of Nyaya- Vaisheshika theological opinions which shows that the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas intended their claim of Ishvara's creatorship to be understood in just this manner. *** The immediate target of Shantideva's refutation in verses of the wisdom chapter" of the Bodhicharyavatara is the Nyaya-Vaisheshika view of divinity, which is that Ishvara (God) possesses the five qualities of divinity, purity and worthiness of veneration, permanence, 9

10 partlessness, and being the single solitary cause of everything (MB 338, PW 146). While it is possible that Shantideva views these qualities to be indispensable constituents of all theistic godconcepts as such and not as particulars of the Nyaya-Vaisheshika school, the best interpretation of his argument restricts its force to the god-concept actually addressed, lest the argument fail through overreaching. If it is read as a specific refutation of the Nyaya-Vaisheshika god-concept, Shantideva's argument has a certain, though limited success. If the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas in fact asserted the positions Shantideva attributes to them, some of his arguments against them (especially the argument which proceeds from the incompatibility of the five qualities of divinity with the qualities of the elements) are persuasive. The argument in 122cd about cause/effect being relational terms, and hence an unconditioned cause being an incoherent (or at least incomprehensible!) concept appears successful on any account. Other arguments are less obviously plausible - for instance, the arguments at seem to involve some special pleading, in that one suspects that (e.g.) the Buddha's desire to save sentient beings would be exempt from the criticism leveled against Ishvara's desire to create them, and that a sculptor would be called a creator even if he used an instrumental means such as a chisel in order to do so. The argument there seems generally to involve a forced notion of autonomy/heteronomy in which having the slightest assisting conditions or explanation for one's behavior strips one of all agency. Argumentation where Shantideva attempts to disprove Ishvara's identity or claim to be a creator through a process of elimination of possible entities Ishvara could be or have created succeeds if one accepts the Prasangika-Madhyamika categorization of phenomena as exhausting the field of conceivable entities, but has persuasive limitations if one begins from a rather 10

11 different set of metaphysical assumptions, as one suspects anyone who might actually be convinced by this argument (that is, a non-prasangika-madhyamika) must. One might generalize and say that the success and limitation of Shantideva's arguments are related - that this is a defense of the Prasangika-Madhyamika approach to those who already accept most or all Prasangika-Madhyamika presuppositions, not intended to communicate well (or perhaps at all) to those coming from a very different understanding. The most serious difficulty with Shantideva's refutation for my purposes is his apparent inability (understandable, if he could not have been exposed to such argumentation!) to understand and take seriously the recourse to apophasis (or unsaying) commonly made in theological discourse. Shantideva rejects the concept of an inconceivable God who cannot properly be described without so much as a comment. "It's inconceivable, they say. Then likewise is its creatorship. Is there any point, therefore, to such a claim?" (120). This is unfortunate, as many theological traditions are aware that their statements about God, when treated as first-order metaphysical claims and pressed to their logical conclusions, generate absurdities of precisely the kind Shantideva enumerates. This is not new information to theists - indeed, in some theological accounts this insight is frontloaded into the god-concept itself, with intellectual representatives of the tradition claiming that God is properly unknowable/ineffable and that language about God, rather than providing direct knowledge of the divine nature, is intended toward some effect in the life of the religious practitioner. This amounts to a theistic equivalent of Shantideva's "two realities" account of truth, and much of the language Shantideva uses (for example) to justify offerings to the Buddha and/or efforts to save sentient beings if there are no inherently-existing persons could in the same measure be applied 11

12 by Shantideva's theistic opponents in their efforts to defend devotion (bhakti) if God (Ishvara) is properly inconceivable. For Shantideva, the "two realities" are "conventional reality" (the world of valid, mistaken cognitions derived by the intellect from ordinary sense experience) and "ultimate reality" (the valid, unmistaken perception of things through direct yogic awareness, which differs from conventional reality in that the objects of perception are not imputed real existence). This is a particular, philosophical application of the common Mahayana Buddhist "skill-in-means" account of the truth of predication, in which the truth of statements at the conventional level is understood to adhere not in their correspondence to metaphysical reality, but in their usefulness for deluded beings operating in the a world of appearances. Perhaps the locus classicus for this understanding is the "ox-cart" simile from ch. 3 of the Lotus Sutra: "Shariputra, what do you think of this? When this rich man impartially handed out to his sons these big carriages adorned with rare jewels [gifts very different from what he had promised them in order to induce them to leave a burning building], was he guilty of falsehood or not?" Shariputra said, "No, World-Honored One. This rich man simply made it possible for his sons to escape the peril of fire and preserve their lives. He did not commit a falsehood" (Watson, 58). In the Lotus Sutra, this simile is used to justify the assertion that all three vehicles (shravaka, pratyekabuddha, and bodhisattva) are genuinely taught by the Buddha as means to liberation, even though only the bodhisattva vehicle in fact leads to liberation. This statement (called an upaya) is true not for corresponding to some state of affairs, either metaphysical or mundane, but for its soteriological usefulness is getting people onto the path in the first place. For the intellectually sophisticated theist, the "two realities" are "kataphasis" (conventional language about God in which one makes statements, which, while not true of God's nature in the sense intended, are true in the sense that they have positive moral/intellectual effects on the persons using them) and "apophasis" (in which one uses unsettling, destabilizing 12

13 language to divest language of its purported metaphysical reference, ultimately so disorienting the intellect that it rests in direct, non-dual awareness of God and ceases intellectual predication). This is more like Shantideva's "two realities" paradigm than the more general approach in the Lotus Sutra - the problem with kataphasis (or conventional language about God) is specifically the intellect's predication of qualities to God, such as existence, which are false and/or incomprehensible about God when affirmed as predications rather than experienced with direct non-dual insight. If you prefer, kataphatic statements express valid, mistaken cognitions of God - mistaken not because God doesn't exist in any sense whatsoever (i.e. wherever you go in the universe, there is no valid perception of God) or because the qualities God is said to possess are ones God doesn't exemplify at all (i.e. the tradition says God is good, but truth be known, he is evil), but because what the intellect understands and expresses in language when it affirms the existence/qualities of God are not what these things are in themselves. God doesn't "exist" (in the sense that the intellect understands existence), God exists (in the mode it is proper for God to exist) - and the "existence" that the intellect affirms is not the one with which God "exists". Intellect imputes an additional overlay to the valid cognition of things - an imputation of God existing/having qualities in a particular way - that turns an otherwise valid, unmistaken cognition into a valid, mistaken one. The trick is to "unsay" what intellect falsifies until it falls away, and apprehend God in direct, non-dual awareness. In that way, what is affirmed about God in kataphasis is not lost, but transfigured - apophasis does not undo conventional language about God, but reveals its true meaning. Shantideva may not have had an obligation to treat a developed (rather than merely ad hoc) form of apophatic theism - it is possible that he was unaware of the entire family of 13

14 arguments, even that they had not been conceived in the Indian philosophy of his time. But in our era, I believe there is an onus on adherents of the Prasangika-Madhyamika philosophy to go further than Shantideva if they wish to refute theistic argumentation, explaining why apophatic gods cannot function soteriologically like Buddhas, or why the intellectual move that defends the two realities in Buddhism cannot be deployed to the benefit of theology by distinguishing between conventional and ultimate discourse about God. This would be a valuable intellectual exchange which could enrich the philosophical understandings of each religious tradition involved in the discussion. 14

15 Bibliography: Duerlinger, James. Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy Coursepack. Gyatso, Kelsang. Meaningful to Behold: The Bodhisattva's Way of Life. Glen Sprey: Tharpa Publications, Gyatso, Tenzin. Practicing Wisdom: The Perfection of Shantideva's Bodhisattva Way. Jinpa, Thupten transl. Boston: Wisdom Publications, Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli and Moore, Charles. A Source Book in Indian Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Shantideva. A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. Batchelor, Stephen transl. Dharmamsala: Indraprastha Press,